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1-29-2022
Greetings, Readers. This is again your author, Eric Fretheim, online as Fushigi on this site and Discord, and as /u/ericthefred on reddit.
With the preceding chapter, Volume Seven is complete. This afterword is being inserted after the fact (after completing Volume Eight!) so it will be short.
Why didn’t I close volume seven properly back at the time I was writing it? Frankly, because I wasn’t sure at the time where the actual end would be. I actually initially thought it would be after Chapter 344, which concluded Tiana’s chat with Gaia. But I didn’t feel it was satisfactory as a volume ending. Then I considered doing it after Chapter 348. But then I would have this little short end thing involving their wrapping up the stay in Sky Ocen as the beginning of Volume 8, and it didn’t feel right. So I finally set it at Tiana’s exit back into the normal world.
Volume Seven was, frankly, the ‘Training Arc’, although I feel I avoided the standard script. First of all, the main character is normally the trainee, not the trainer. But, in a fashion, Tiana was training herself as an Elder and didn’t know it, so perhaps it is appropriate anyway. I don’t know how successful it was as a volume, but I feel like it revealed a lot about her and about the past and the wider multiverse outside of Huade. More importantly, it allowed us to actually meet these other people that Tiana has been in the past. So this was a volume not so much about progressing the existing story as it was about fleshing out the people and the setting. I hope it worked.
Well, this is more a volume end marker than a real afterword, so I am not going to write as long. I will say that there was a lot about the mechanics of the universe in this volume, so I would like to clarify a bit of it.
The key element of this volume was Spiritual Energy. It is a factor that the people of Huade do not understand well, because the only people that really use it a lot, the fairies, do so purely by instinct. The older ones do understand it to a great extent, and use their understanding to teach younger ones how to cultivate, but again, it is largely through flying by the seats of their pants. It is the aliens of this world, people like Fan Li and Daq R’mion, who have an actual grasp on how it works, in a well-formulated ‘book knowledge’ or scientific way.
One term reveals a lot here. “Fairy Sense” is often mentioned in this story, and it is actually the exact same thing as “Spiritual Sense”, the difference being that “Fairy Sense” is the inborn ability that fairies have, while “Spiritual Sense” is the more refined understanding that Fan Li or an Immortal would have, by coming at it from the perspective of knowledge. Fan Li also has Will (a concept that Daq R’mion and Kwelabi also understand, BTW) as a trained, intellectually-informed skill, while fairies use it for flying and swimming and things like a dryad or green man’s control over plants without realizing they are doing it. It’s like the difference between when a dancer uses their legs or when a baby uses their legs. One is trained and knowledgeable, executing a well-honed talent, while the other is doing it without thinking.
I could probably write a lot more on these subjects, but I think I will end it with this. If you have questions, please feel free to ask in comments or on Discord.
Now, On to Volume Eight! Or, if you are reading this do to the ping notice on Discord, you want to go on to read the Volume Eight afterword which will post immediately after this. There will be no volume seven appendices, but I’ll be posting new appendices after the Volume Eight afterword.
Once again, thanks very much to all my readers for reading this. It is a pleasure getting your comments and reviews, so please keep them coming!!
